ABSTRACT
This chapter explores sourcing, sensing, and sharing raw ingredients: ethnic Bengali food as an affective, sensorial, and material process. Drawing on the differences and similarities in our individual and collective memories as well as our cultural and geopolitical subjectivities, I examine how our culinary memories and knowledge of two different homes (Dhaka and Kolkata) recreates a new collective sense of belonging at the Gold Coast in Australia. In doing so, I make two suggestions. First, reflecting on the differences and commonalities that emerge from our culinary practices, I map the ways in which our lived diasporic experiences are mediated through gastronomic materialities. I suggest that this process can dissolve emotional barriers of geopolitical complexities and socio-cultural stereotypes in creating a collective sense of home. Second, I argue that this process of creating a food-centred ‘sense of home’ aids in rethinking the ways in which memory and city spaces renegotiate their relationship with each other.
